the problem you have showed is an excellent point, as i am confronted only
too often with people like the ones you are criticizing.
treating mere ideas as 'real' things (quotaion marks with respect to the
radical constructivism) is an attitude which should be found in theology,
but better not among scholars, all the more, as you cannot make discussions
on such matters of faith.

> Allow me to complain about a habit of mind that makes clear thinking more
> difficult for us than need be. This is the habit of writing about vague
> notions as if they were concrete realities. Two of the best known ones are
> hypertext and "the" Semantic Web.

I noticed that a term in the subject line doesn't reappear in the body of
the message. That term is "reification". I don't quite understand how it
connects with the question of the existence of the entities in question
(hypertext, the Semantic Web). Reification is the process whereby a
process is taken as an object, n'est-ce pas? Whether the process or object
are in your languaage "concreate realities" or counterfactual entities is
moot, no?

Just what is it that makes clear thinking? You seem to imply that clear
thinking is dependent upon a hesitency to take processes as objects. Are
you in danger of pushing that insight to the point where reification
itself is reified?

Of course, clear thinking benefits from a muddle. Now that you have
stirred the pot, care to enlighten us as to the context that gave rise to
the complaint? What's cooking?

On Thu, Oct 30, 2003 at 06:39:58AM +0000, Humanist Discussion Group (by way
of Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>) wrote:
> Allow me to complain about a habit of mind that makes clear thinking more
> difficult for us than need be. This is the habit of writing about vague
> notions as if they were concrete realities. Two of the best known ones are
> hypertext and "the" Semantic Web.

Let us imagine a young married couple about to build their first home.

"We're so excited about the house."

"It has four bathrooms!"

"You can see the mountains from the back bedroom."

Would it make any sense for us to point out that the house (since it
is not built, but only "theorized") is a "pseudo-thing?" Would we
accuse them of engaging in facile vagaries for having mortgaged this
"muddle of ideas" from an architect who has not really provided a
"clear look" (but only an ideal representation) of what it will
actually be when it is actually instantiated?

Willard ends by saying that he is "not arguing against having and
using an imagination (which by definition makes things present to
the mind that are absent or non-existent)." However, he may be
arguing against a basic property of language use. If you are aware
that there is no house (just as you are aware--or should be
aware--that there is neither an instantiated semantic web nor an
ideal hypertextual environment), then nothing is hidden. Only a
casual interloper into these matters would assert otherwise, since
the literature as a whole is quite clear on the matter. Alex
Soojung-Kim Pang is hardly the first to point out that no extant
hypertextual technology rises to the ideal that the theoretical
discourse posits; it has been reiterated countless times in the
literature. At this point, it's a little like pointing out to a
group of geometers that triangles don't "really" exist.

If one insists on exposing all of this as a baldly nefarious
rhetorical tactic, then one may be compelled to admit that language
itself is baldly nefarious. Such ellipses as these are not isolated
language events, but ubiquitous elements of both ordinary natural
language and learned discourse.

I have noticed that most cars, televisions, stereos, etc., do not appear
in real life exactly as they do in the manuals, and yet this does not
seem to deter billions of people from using them every single day.

I would presume the same is true of HyperText, the Web, the Internet,
or even the computer, keyboard and modem I am using to send this. . .
yet somehow I feel the message will arrive intact, as do the various
hypertext eBooks available from Project Gutenberg.